Holy Disorders Page 2

  ‘Be careful with that,’ said the pink young man.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Malicious intent,’ said the other. He picked up the blackjack, tossed it in the air, and nodded sagely. ‘I’m afraid that butterfly-net’s no good now,’ he added, with a relapse into his previous melancholy. ‘Torn to bits. You’d better take another.’ He went over and got one. ‘Seventeen-and-six, I think we said.’ Mechanically Geoffrey produced the money.

  A roar of mingled rage and stupefaction from below indicated that the footballs had arrived at their destination. ‘Fielding!’ a voice boomed up at them. ‘What the devil are you doing up there?’

  ‘I think,’ said the young man pensively, ‘that it would be better if we left – at once.’

  ‘But your job!’ Geoffrey gazed at him helplessly.

  ‘I’ve probably lost it, anyway, thanks to this. Something of this sort always seems to happen to me. The last place I was at one of the assistants went mad and took off all her clothes. I wonder if I’ve left anything?’ He buffeted his pockets, as one who searches for matches. ‘I generally do. At least three pairs of gloves a year – in trains.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Geoffrey urgently. He was feeling unnaturally exhilarated, and obsessed by a primitive desire to escape from the scene of the disturbance. Footsteps clattered up the steps towards them. The lift-girl apocalyptically threw open the doors of the lift, announced, as one ushering in the day of judgement: ‘Sports, children’s, books, ladies’ – shrieked out at the chaos confronting her, and closed the doors again, whence she and her passengers peered out like anxious rabbits awaiting the arrival of green-stuffs. The accidental touch of a button sent the lift shooting earthwards again; from it rapidly diminishing sounds of altercation could be heard.

  Geoffrey and the pink young man ran for the stairs.

  On their way down, they met a shop-walker and two assistants, pounding grimly upwards.

  ‘There’s a lunatic up there trying to break up the stock,’ said the young man with a sudden blood-curdling intensity which, by contrast with his normal tones, sounded horrifyingly convincing. ‘Go and see what you can do – I’m off to fetch the police.’

  The shop-walker snatched Geoffrey’s gun, which he was still brandishing, and leaped on upwards. Geoffrey engaged in feeble protests.

  ‘Don’t hang about,’ said the young man, tugging at his sleeve.

  They continued their precipitate downward rush to the street.

  ‘Well, and what was all that about?’ asked the young man, leaning back in his corner of the taxi and stretching out his legs.

  Geoffrey deferred replying for a moment. He was engaged in a minute scrutiny of the driver, though obscurely conscious of not knowing what he expected this activity to reveal. No chances must be taken, however; the encounter in the shop indicated that much. He transferred his suspicion to the young man, and prepared to make searching inquiries as to his trustworthiness. It suddenly struck him, however, that this might well appear ungracious, as it certainly would have done.

  ‘I hardly know,’ he said lamely.

  The young man appeared pleased. ‘Then we must go into the matter from the beginning,’ he announced. ‘He nearly got you, you know. Can’t have that sort of thing.’ He proffered his determination to uphold the law a trifle inanely. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Paddington,’ said Geoffrey, and added hastily: ‘That is to say – I mean – possibly.’ The conversation was not going well, and his brief feeling of exhilaration had vanished.

  ‘I know what it is,’ said the young man. ‘You don’t trust me. And quite right, too. A man in your position oughtn’t to trust anyone. Still, I’m all right, you know; saved you getting a lump on your head the size of an Easter egg.’ He wiped his brow and loosened his collar. ‘My name’s Fielding – Henry Fielding.’

  Geoffrey embarked without enthusiasm on a second-rate witticism. ‘Not the author of Tom Jones, I suppose?’ He regretted it the moment it was out.

  ‘Tom Jones? Never heard of it. A book, is it? Don’t get much time for reading. And you?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I mean, I introduced myself, so I thought you—’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course, Geoffrey Vintner. And I must thank you for acting as promptly as you did; heaven knows what would have happened to me if you hadn’t interfered.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘What do you mean – Oh, I see. But it occurs to me now, you know, that we really ought to have stayed and seen the police. It’s all very well dashing off like a couple of schoolboys who’ve been robbing an orchard, but there are certain proprieties to be observed.’ Geoffrey became suddenly bored with this line of thought. ‘Anyway, I had to catch a train.’

  ‘And our friend,’ said Fielding, ‘was presumably trying to stop you. Which brings us back to the question of what it’s all about.’ He wiped his brow again.

  Geoffrey, however, was distracted, idly musing on a Passacaglia and Fugue commissioned from him for the New Year. It had not been going well in any case, and the interruption of his present mission seemed unlikely to prosper it. But not even prospective oblivion will prevent a composer from brooding despondently and maddeningly on his own works. Geoffrey embarked on a mental performance: Ta-ta; ta-ta-ta-ti-ta-ti…

  ‘I wonder,’ Fielding added, ‘if they’ve anticipated the failure of the first attack, and provided a second line of defence.’

  This unexpected confusion of military metaphors shook Geoffrey. The spectral caterwaulings were abruptly stilled. ‘I believe you said that to frighten me,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me what’s going on. If I’m an enemy, I know already—’

  ‘I didn’t say—’

  ‘And if I’m not, I may be able to help.’

  So in the end Geoffrey told him. As precise information it amounted to very little.

  ‘I don’t see that helps much,’ Fielding objected when he had finished. He examined the telegram and letter. ‘And who is this Fen person, anyway?’

  ‘Professor of English at Oxford. We were up together. I haven’t seen much of him since, though I happened to hear he was going to be in Tolnbridge during the long vac. Why he should send for me—’ Geoffrey made a gesture of humorous resignation, and upset the butterfly-net, which was poised precariously in a transverse position across the interior of the cab. With some acrimony they jerked it into place again.

  ‘I can’t think,’ said Geoffrey, after contemplating for a moment finishing his previous sentence and deciding against it, ‘why Fen insisted on my bringing that thing.’

  ‘Rather odd, surely? Is he a collector?’

  ‘One never quite knows with Fen. In anyone else, though – well, yes, I suppose it would seem odd.’

  ‘He seems to know something about this Brooks business.’

  ‘Well, he’s there, of course. And then,’ Geoffrey added as a laborious afterthought, ‘he’s a detective, in a way.’

  Fielding looked disconcerted; he had evidently been reserving this rôle for himself and disliked the thought of competition. A little peevishly he asked:

  ‘Not an official detective, surely?’

  ‘No, no, amateur. But he’s been very successful.’

  ‘Gervase Fen – I don’t seem to have heard of him,’ said Fielding. Then after a moment’s thought: ‘What a silly name. Is he in with the police?’ His tone suggested Fen’s complicity in some orgiastic and disgraceful organization.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. It’s only what I’ve heard.’

  ‘I wonder if you’d mind my coming with you to Tolnbridge? I’m sick of the store. And with the war on, it seems so remote from anything—’

  ‘Couldn’t you join up?’

  ‘No, they won’t have me. I volunteered last November, but they graded me four, I joined the ARP, of course, and I’m thinking of going in for this new LDV racket, but blast it all—’

  ‘You look healthy enough,’ said Geoffrey.

 
; ‘So I am. Nothing wrong with me except shaky eyesight. They don’t grade you four for that, do they?’

  ‘No. Perhaps,’ Geoffrey suggested encouragingly, ‘you’re suffering from some hidden, fatal disease you haven’t known about.’

  Fielding ignored this. ‘I want to do something active about this war – something romantic.’ He mopped his brow again, looking the reverse of romantic. ‘I tried to join the Secret Service, but it was no good. You can’t join the Secret Service in this country. Not just like that.’ And he slapped his hands together to indicate some platonic idea of facility.

  Geoffrey considered. In view of what had happened it would almost certainly be very useful to have Fielding with him on his journey, and there was no reason to suspect him of ulterior motive.

  ‘…After all, war hasn’t become so mechanized that solitary, individual daring no longer matters,’ Fielding was saying; he seemed transported to some Valhalla of Secret Service agents. ‘You’ll laugh at me, of course’ – Geoffrey smiled a hasty and unconvincing negative – ‘but in the long run it is the people who dream of being men of action who are men of action. Admittedly Don Quixote made a fool of himself with the windmills, but when all’s said and done, there probably were giants about.’ He sighed gently as the taxi turned into the Marylebone Road.

  ‘I should very much like to have you with me,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But look here – what about your job? One must have money.’

  ‘That’ll be all right. I have some money of my own.’ Fielding assembled his features into a perfunctory expression of surprise. ‘Oh, I ought perhaps to have mentioned it. Debrett, Who’s Who, and such publications, credit me with an earldom.’

  Geoffrey summoned up a cheerful laugh, but there was something in Fielding’s assurance which forbade him to utter it.

  ‘Only very minor, of course,’ the other hastened to explain. ‘And I’ve never done a thing to deserve it, I inherited it.’

  ‘Then what on earth,’ said Geoffrey, ‘were you doing in that shop?’

  ‘Store,’ Fielding corrected him solemnly. ‘Well, I heard there was a shortage of people to serve in shops, owing to call-up and so on, so I thought that might be one way I could help. Only temporarily, of course,’ he added warily. ‘Just as a joke,’ he ended feebly.

  Geoffrey suppressed his merriment with difficulty.

  Fielding suddenly chuckled.

  ‘I suppose it is rather preposterous, when you come to think of it. By the way’ – a sudden thought struck him – ‘are you Geoffrey Vintner, the composer?’

  ‘Only very minor, of course.’

  They surveyed one another properly for the first time, and found the result pleasing. The taxi clattered into the murk of Paddington. A sudden noise disturbed them.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Fielding. ‘The bloody net’s fallen down again.’

  2

  Do not Travel for Pleasure

  A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of

  pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love.

  BACON

  After the dim, barn-like vastness of Waterloo, Paddington appeared like an infernal pit. Here there was not the order, the strict division and segregation of mechanical and human which prevailed at the larger station. Inextricably, engines and passengers seethed and milled together, the barriers provided for their separation seeming no more than the inconvenient erections of an obstacle-race. The crowds, turgid, stormy, and densely-packed, appeared more likely to clamber on to the backs of the trains, like children piling on to a donkey at the seaside, than merely to board them in the normal way. The locomotives panted and groaned like expiring hedgehogs prematurely over-run by hordes of predatory ants; any attempt at departure, one felt, must infallibly crush and dissipate these insects in their thousands – it would be impossible for them to disentangle themselves from the buffers and connecting-rods in time.

  Amongst the crowds the heat banished comfort, but stimulated the itch to uneasy and purposeless movement. Certain main streams, between the bars, the platform, the ticket-offices, the lavatories, and the main entrances, were perhaps discernible; but they had only the conventional boundaries of currents on a map – they overflowed their banks amongst the merely impassive, who stood at the angles of their confluence in attitudes of melancholy or despair. Observed from ground level, this mass of humanity exhibited, in its efforts to move hither and thither, surprising divergences from the horizontal; people pressed forward to their destinations leaning forward at a dangerous, angle, or, peering round the bodies of those in front of them, presented the appearance of criminals half-decapitated. A great many troops, bearing ponderous white cylinders apparently filled with lead, elbowed their way apologetically about, or sat on kit-bags and allowed themselves to be buffeted from all angles. Railway officials controlled the scene with the uneasy authority of schoolmasters trying to extort courteous recognition from their pupils after term had ended.

  ‘Good God,’ said Geoffrey as he struggled forward, carrying a suitcase with which he made periodic involuntary assaults on the knees of the passers-by, ‘are we even going to get on this train?’

  Fielding, still inappropriately dressed in the morning clothes belonging to his recent occupation, merely grunted; the temperature seemed to overcome him. When they had progressed, clawing and pushing, another two yards, he said:

  ‘What time is it supposed to go?’

  ‘Not for three-quarters of an hour yet.’ The relevant part of the sentence was drowned in a sudden demoniac outburst of hooting and whistling. He repeated it at the top of his voice. ‘Three-quarters of an hour,’ he bellowed.

  Fielding nodded, and then, surprisingly, vanished, with a shouted explanation of which the only word audible was ‘clothes’. A little bemused, Geoffrey laboured to the ticket-office. The tickets occupied him for some twenty minutes, but in any case the train seemed likely to depart late. He waved his bag in optimistic query at a porter, passing on some nameless, leisurely errand, and was ignored.

  Then he went, reflecting a little sadly on the miseries which our indulgences cause us, to get a drink.

  The refreshment-room was decorated with gilt and marble; their inappropriate splendours cast a singular gloom over the proceedings. By the forethought of those responsible for getting people on to trains the clock had been put ten minutes fast, a device which led to frequent panics of departure among those who were under the impression that it showed the right time. They were immediately reassured by others, whose watches were slow. Upon discovery of the real hour, a second and more substantial panic occurred. Years of the Defence of the Realm Act had conditioned the British public to remain in bars until the latest possible moment.

  Geoffrey deposited his bag by a pillar (someone immediately fell over it), and elbowed his way to the bar, which he clutched with the determination of a shipwrecked sailor who has reached a friendly shore. The sirens lurking behind it, with comparative freedom of movement, were engaged in friendly discourse with regular customers. A barrage of imperative glances and despairing cries for attention failed, for the most part, to move them. Some brandished coins in the hope that this display of affluence and good faith would jerk these figures into motion. Geoffrey found himself next to a dwarfish commercial traveller, who was treating one of the barmaids to a long, rambling fantasy about the disadvantages of early marriage, as freely exemplified by himself and many friends and relations. By pushing him malignantly out of the way, Geoffrey managed eventually to get a drink.

  Fielding reappeared as inexplicably as he had gone, dressed in a sports coat and flannels and carrying a suitcase. He explained rather breathlessly that he had been back to his flat, and demanded beer. The ritual of entreaty was again enacted. ‘Travelling,’ said Fielding with deep feeling.

  ‘I hope we don’t have to get in with any babies,’ said Geoffrey gloomily. ‘If they don’t shriek out and crawl all over me, they’re invariably sick.’

  There were
babies – one, at least – but the first-class compartment containing it was the only one with two seats vacant – one of them, on to which Geoffrey at once hurled a mass of impedimenta in token of ownership, an outside corner. He then applied himself to getting Fen’s butterfly-net on to the rack, assisted by Fielding, and watched with interest by the other occupants of the compartment. It was just too long. Geoffrey regarded it with hatred: it was growing, in his eyes, into a monstrous symbol of the inconvenience, shame, and absurdity of his preposterous errand.

  ‘Try standing it up against the window,’ said the man sitting in the corner opposite Geoffrey’s. His plumpness and pinkness outdid Fielding’s. Geoffrey felt, regarding him, like a man who while brandishing an Amati is suddenly confronted with a Strad.

  They put this scheme into practice; whenever anyone moved his feet the net fell down again.

  ‘What a thing to bring on a train,’ said the woman with the baby, sotto voce.

  It was eventually decided to lay the net transversely across the carriage, from one rack to the other. The whole compartment rose – not with any enthusiasm, since it was so hot – to do justice to this idea. A woman seated in one of the other corners, with a face white and pock-marked like a plucked chicken’s breast, complainingly shifted her luggage to make room. Then she sat down again and insulated herself unnecessarily against the surrounding humanity with a rug, which made Geoffrey hot even to look at. With a great deal of obscure mutual encouragement and admonition, such as ‘Up she goes’ and ‘Steady, now’, Geoffrey, Fielding, the fat man, and a young clergyman who occupied the remaining corner hoisted the net into position. The baby, hitherto quiescent, awoke and embarked upon a running commentary of snorts and shrieks; it grunted like the pig-baby in Alice, until they expected it to be metamorphosed before their eyes. The mother jogged it ruthlessly up and down, and glared malignantly at the progenitors of the disturbance. People searching for seats peered into the compartment and attempted to assess the number of people engaged in this hullabaloo. One went so far as to open the door and ask if there was any room, but he was ignored, and soon went away again.